Among these Fields of Gold
by starfishstar
Summary: "Someday we'll come here with your grandchildren, Prongs," Remus said. "You'll tell stories about the old days and they'll be horrified their doddering elders ever did young people things." "Like this, you mean?" James asked, leaning over to give Lily a smacking kiss. "My eyes, Prongs!" Sirius moaned. "Or it will just be Sirius you horrify," Remus smirked, as Sirius tackled James.


Disclaimer: I don't own the wizarding world or Number 12, Grimmauld Place.

Tangentially inspired by Eva Cassidy's version of "Fields of Gold."

. . . . .

In those terrible first weeks after Sirius died, when Remus was pretending for everyone else's sake that things were fine, but he himself was quietly coming apart, when he politely declined the others' pity and their offers of a place to stay, busy assuring everyone that yes, of course he was sleeping, when of course he wasn't – in those nightmare first weeks, when he was no more than dead on his feet, Remus went just once to Grimmauld Place.

Dumbledore had warned them not to, that it wasn't safe until he could test that the house truly had passed into Harry's possession, but Remus found he didn't much care. It was only himself he endangered by going there and frankly, at the moment himself didn't seem like all that much to lose.

What Remus wanted was a memento.

Selfishly, blindly, without forming coherent thoughts about it, Remus needed some object to remind him that Sirius had existed. And not just Sirius, but also James, and Lily, and the friendship that had been between all of them.

Remus himself had always been on the go too much to get particularly sentimental about objects. He'd generally kept a few clothes and a few books and that was about it.

Lily had been the one for carefully preserving memories, keeping an ongoing album titled "Harry's First Year" (and later "Harry's Second Year," which unsurprisingly picked up where the first left off) and making sure everyone made it into at least one of the photographs whenever they all gathered together. All of that was gone, though, in the blast that had destroyed half their house in Godric's Hollow.

James was more of a one for grand gestures, for actions not objects, more likely to sweep them all off on an expensive holiday simply because he could than to put a lot of consideration into gifts at birthdays and Christmas.

Sirius was the only one who had really kept random things, dropping them willy-nilly round his flat, then never bothering to pick them up again. Remus suspected that, through the same inexplicable forces that defined so much about Sirius, some of those items might have ended up back in the house where his friend had spent the beginning and the end of his life.

So Remus went to Grimmauld Place.

It wasn't as bad as he'd expected. The spells on the front door were still the same ones he'd unlocked a thousand times before. The house was empty. And he himself was too numb to really register the pain he probably ought to have felt at being there again.

Remus headed for Sirius' bedroom, a place he'd rarely entered when Sirius was alive. He paused with his hand on the doorframe, feeling a stab of guilt, an awareness that he was trespassing on another man's privacy. When Sirius had retreated to that room, it had generally meant he wanted to brood alone. Social Sirius had made himself available on the lower floors of the house; antisocial Sirius retreated to his bedroom or to Buckbeak.

At the thought of Buckbeak, Remus gripped the doorframe more tightly, the grief he couldn't allow himself to experience on his own behalf suddenly threatening to overwhelm him. Sirius had been so fond of the creature, had taken almost absurdly good care of him. Buckbeak had seemed to return that affection in his own Hippogriph way. And because Buckbeak was an animal, not a person, you couldn't even explain to him why Sirius was never coming back.

Remus would not cry over a Hippogriph. He would not.

He pushed open the door to the room and stepped inside cautiously.

There were clothes slung over chairs, books lying open on the desk, as if Sirius were about to walk in and pick up where he had left off. Gryffindor banners and boyish posters adorned the walls – Sirius clearly hadn't felt an urge to settle in and redecorate when he'd arrived back at the house after his two-decade absence.

Remus noticed a photograph of the four of them – him and James and Sirius and Peter, with their arms around each other – stuck to one wall, but somehow it didn't draw him as a keepsake. Too static, too far back in their schooldays. And besides, too little of Lily and far too much of Peter.

He turned to the chest of drawers, tugging open the top one first. Just as he'd expected, it was crammed full of the oddest assortment of items, self-inking quills and mismatched buttons and what Remus sincerely hoped was not a whole, desiccated frog. He shifted aside socks and sheaves of parchment and at the bottom of the second drawer, found what he'd been looking for. Perhaps even the very object he'd been looking for, without realising it.

The photograph showed James and Lily lying on a picnic blanket in a seemingly endless field, holding hands and laughing into the camera. The slanting sunlight made the grass appear golden, highlighting Lily's hair and glinting off of James' glasses. A late afternoon in spring, one of the first truly warm days, when everything was in bloom and there had been a blessed lull in the worst of the war.

They'd gone on an impromptu picnic, the four of them, Remus and James and Lily and Sirius. Peter hadn't had time to join them, which they should have seen as a sign even then. But they hadn't, and that was that.

Remus could almost smell the freshness of the air that spring, as he held the photograph in both hands. The world had seemed full of promise, somehow, despite the war. Lily was pregnant then, though you could hardly tell in the picture, and no one had realised yet that the danger was about to increase a hundredfold. The tide had even seemed to be turning against Voldemort. They had been young and James and Lily were in love and the world was full of adventure.

"Let's come here every year," James had said. "On the first real day of spring, you lot have to drop whatever you're doing at your boring, grown-up jobs and we'll all Apparate out to this very field and have a picnic and celebrate the fact that the world is _beautiful_."

Lily shifted so she could see James better and quirked an eyebrow at him. "Oh? We'll all have boring, grown-up jobs and you won't?"

He flashed her a grin. "Lily, darling, you know very well that whatever I do, it will always be the height of adventure and daring."

Sirius, meanwhile, groaned and rolled his eyes. "I'm not sure if I can take that, yearly picnics where we have to watch out for your ever-increasing number of rugrats. You'll probably have another one every time I see you."

It was a time when Sirius had been bouncing manically between impotent distress at this further proof of James' abandonment – first Lily, then marriage, and now _this_ – and bursting pride, because just a few weeks earlier, James had asked him to be the baby's godfather. It sometimes gave Remus a headache just watching him.

At that picnic, though, he'd been in rare good form, insisting Remus take a picture of just the newlyweds because, as he said, "They're the most photogenic, no offence Moony, but there's something about being sappily in love that just makes people want to take pictures of you."

Remus smiled, thinking of that. In the photograph, James winked at someone outside the frame, and Remus could picture Sirius standing just off camera, wearing that ridiculous, ratty leather jacket he loved so much and a rakish smile. Probably smoking a cigarette purely for the sake of aggravating Lily, but secretly making sure he was downwind of her and the not-yet-even-born baby.

Remus remembered himself nodding and saying, "And someday we'll be coming here with your grandchildren, Prongs, and they'll all run round the field and you'll try to tell them stories about the old days and they'll be properly horrified to think their doddering elders ever even did young people things."

"Like this, you mean?" James asked and leaned over to give Lily a smacking kiss on the lips.

"Ewww!" Sirius moaned. "My eyes, Prongs! My eyes!"

"Or it will just be Sirius you horrify," Remus murmured, suppressing a smirk as Sirius tackled James and the two of them wrestled about on the blanket.

Lily scooted out of harm's way and exchanged an amused glance with Remus. "Boys," she mouthed, and Remus couldn't help but agree. At least he'd managed to snap one nice picture before Sirius regressed to his usual inner child.

All the photograph showed was James and Lily on the blanket, James reaching for Lily's hand as they both smiled up into the camera. But when Remus looked at them, he could picture clearly the wrestling match that had ensued, the two young men sitting back up, panting, James adjusting his glasses and Lily smoothing his hair back down for him, mock-solicitous.

Sirius straightened his jacket and grinned up at Remus. "Sit _down_ already, Remus, you're making everybody nervous. You look like the wedding photographer or something."

James gave an undignified snort. "He _was _ridiculous, wasn't he?"

"He was just trying to do his job well," Lily protested.

Sirius disagreed. "He had eyes like a startled opossum on toadstool tonic and he jumped at every little sound." He cocked his head to the side. "Hey, do you think he _was _on toadstool tonic?"

Remus came to sit with them, carefully setting the camera down beside the blanket, and was promptly tackled by Sirius as well.

"Augh, what was that for?" Remus complained, once he'd managed to wrestle Sirius off again.

"Just because," Sirius said, flopping down on the blanket and gazing up at the sky and nothing in particular. Remus was pleased to see how relaxed he looked. Checking again that the camera was truly out of the range of Sirius' flailing limbs – it was a loan from Frank, since none of them had got round to getting one of their own yet – Remus too lay down with his arms folded beneath his head. The sky was perfect blue. The clouds were perfect white.

"It's not a bad idea," Lily mused, with a gentle smile at James that gradually expanded to encompass them all. "We can make it a tradition, getting together on the first day of spring, something you do just _because_, like Christmas or Halloween."

"But _here_," James insisted. "Outdoors. Not around a dining room table, drinking coffee or something."

"Yes," Sirius agreed, flinging himself back up to a sitting position. "And no one's allowed to skip out, no matter what, and that means _you_, Prongs, you and your 700 grandchildren."

"Yes," Remus said, smiling up at the sky. "James and Lily will have many, _many_ grandchildren. And they shall be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth."

They hadn't ever made it back to that field, of course. By the next spring, James and Lily had been in hiding and they'd all had more on their minds than picnics. And by the year after that, James and Lily were dead, Sirius in Azkaban, Harry shunted off to Muggle relatives who would supposedly protect him, and Remus was wandering the world in a daze he wouldn't fully shake off for years.

But as he held the photograph in his hands, this object to remind him that James and Lily and Sirius and their friendship had existed, Remus thought that maybe, at least a tiny bit, it really was the thought that counted.


End file.
